The Aronian Renewal

It is ironic that Raymond Aron's reputation is currently ascendant
everywhere except in the United States, since for many years his sober
defense of political reason was received far more favorably in America
than it was in his native France. The fashionable ideologists of French
intellectual life, from Sartre to Deleuze, who for so long viewed Aron
with suspicion if not outright hostility, have finally, one hopes,
become exhausted. The resurgence of philosophical rigor and political
sanity among the Parisian intelligentsia, a resurgence led by Luc Ferry,
Alain Renaut, Pierre Manent, Marcel Gauchet, and many other
philosophers, social scientists, and historians, owes much to Aron's
lifelong resistance to the totalitarian temptation and the literary
politics that usually attended that temptation. Aron is now recognized,
by all except a small coterie of leftist theorists, as the preeminent
French political thinker of the postwar years.

But what has happened in the United States, which for many years looked
to Aron for inspiration, guidance, and theoretical probity? The
political philosopher John Gray has provided a plausible explanation for
the remarkable and unfortunate turn of affairs that has left few of
Aron's books available in English. In a recent article, "The Left's Last
Utopia," Gray advances the thesis that America has become the focus for
the left's messianic hopes. A cursory look at the United States-with the
most liberal abortion laws in the democratic world, currents of
multiculturalism coursing through the "best" universities and destroying
what might be left of a classical liberal education, and statist models
of economic and environmental regulation forwarded by well-meaning
political elites-would seem to bear out Gray's thesis. Such an
environment is ill-disposed to the penetrating, dispassionate vision of
Raymond Aron.

We have Daniel Mahoney to thank for the fact that Aron's work may once
again gain the hearing it merits in America. Several years ago, Mahoney
published The Liberal Political Science of Raymond Aron, the
first full-length study of Aron's thought to appear in English and by
far the best in any language. Now Mahoney has gathered together some of
Aron's most representative and compelling essays, many appearing in
English translation for the first time. The title of the collection,
In Defense of Political Reason, is perfect, for political
reason is indeed the unifying thread tying
together the disparate writings of the enormous Aronian corpus.
Mahoney's selections and illuminating introductions touch on virtually
every aspect of Aron's thought.

The five principal problems covered in In Defense of Political
Reason together form the theoretical foundation of political
judgment: (1) the morality of prudence, (2) the paradoxes of liberalism
as a political theory, (3) the nature of totalitarianism, (4) the
meaning of history, (5) the question of progress.

Ancient philosophers regarded prudence as the root of virtue, and
prudence in politics requires sensitivity to context, to the historical,
personal, and social setting of the moral act. In "Max Weber and Power
Politics," Aron distances himself from Weber (whose influence on him was
otherwise so profound) by rejecting the Weberian distinction between the
ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility. In the ethics of
conviction the ethical actor, whether revolutionary or pacifist, does
what he will regardless of the consequences. In the ethics of
responsibility, on the other hand, the actor recognizes that
consequences must be reckoned with whether by citizen or by statesman.
Weber gave us no means of preferring one to the other in the political
domain. All values are for Weber a matter of irrational choice: the
revolutionary madman chooses his demon, the Churchillian statesman his,
and never the twain shall meet. Aron could not ultimately accept this,
although his study of Weber often pressured him to do so, particularly
in his earliest writings on the philosophy of history. In this later
essay Aron finds the key to the dilemma Weber posed: while Weber was
correct to see the radical plurality of values of sociology, he was
wrong to transform this into a nihilistic political philosophy. The
ethics of responsibility and the political moderation bound up with it
describe the day-to-day hopes and conflicts of men better than do the
ethics of conviction.

Aron's prudence was not that of Aristotle or Aquinas, however. This
becomes clear in an essay from the 1940s entitled "French Thought in
Exile: Jacques Maritain and the Quarrel over Machiavellianism."
Maritain's Thomistic defense of the common good as the appropriate
benchmark for the conduct of the statesman is dismissed by Aron's
"antinomic" prudence as too unrealistic, as too destructively naive for
the time of Hitler and Stalin. Aron believed that there was finally a
conflict between justice and success, and that the lessons of
Machiavelli could not easily be dismissed. Maritain's politics of the
common good, Aron argued, depended on the primacy of domestic over
foreign policy. But the political was not ruled by the domestic. There
were, are, and indeed will be extreme situations where statesmen,
haunted by the clash between principle and necessity, must justify the
means by virtue of the ends in order to preserve the existence of the
polity. Aron is honest enough to admit, however, that there is no
theoretical solution to the problem of Machiavellianism. Maritain's
accusations of immorality, rooted in natural law, remain relevant.

Unlike the apolitical, ahistorical, abstract liberalism of contemporary
theorists like Rawls, Dworkin, and Ackerman, Aron's defense of liberal
society was deeply political, deeply historical, and extremely concrete.
He was all too aware of the limits and historical failings of
liberalism-the anomie, the erosion of Machiavellian virtue, the moral
void opened up by a neutral liberal state. He would be far more
comfortable with the ideas of Peter Berger, Irving Kristol, and other
neoconservatives-liberals "mugged by reality," in the famous phrase-than
he would be with the dominant liberalism of our time. It is not an
exaggeration to call Aron the first neoconservative.

The evidence for this claim can be discovered in Aron's review essay of
Hayek's Constitution of Liberty, "The Liberal Definition of
Liberty," included in this collection. Hayek's classic work had set
forth two foundational principles for a free society: the existence of a
realm of noncoercion and the universality and generality of law. To
these two principles Hayek wedded classical liberal political economy-
the free market and the "catallaxy" of economic exchange. While deeply
impressed with the rigor of Hayek's thought and imbued with the same
love of liberty, Aron maintained that Hayek had, like most liberal
thinkers, neglected the political.

This neglect manifested itself in four distinct ways. First, a free
society depends on an inescapable dimension of coercion, particularly in
its "federative power." As Aron puts it, "the direction of foreign
relations remains the task of men and not of laws." In the partially
Hobbesian world of international relations, statesmanship is
inescapable. Foreign policy cannot be engaged in without the sovereign
liberty of the statesman, but such sovereign liberty is unavoidably
coercive-it can send people to their deaths, it can withhold information
from the populace, it can transgress the day-to-day laws of the
community. Secondly, liberty as universality and generality of law
cannot be a substitute for moral and political judgment. Laws may be
universal and yet still discriminate, as Mahoney notes: "Rule of law is
at best an ideal but it loses its undoubted dignity when it takes on a
formulaic character, when it is presented as a replacement for politics
and prudence." Thirdly, Hayek never discusses the necessity of solid
mores for the maintenance of civic life. Aron, like the
neoconservatives, stresses the need for civic education; Hayek, like
most libertarian and contemporary liberal thinkers, takes for granted
the continuance of premodern traditions of virtue that provide the moral
capital of liberal civilization but are in danger of being squandered
when liberty decays to license. Finally, Aron is prudent about the
welfare state. Like Hayek, he feels that beyond a certain point the
welfare state becomes suffocating and poses a threat to liberty. But
unlike Hayek, Aron believes a limited welfare state is compatible with
liberty and could even preserve it. In any modern democracy, Aron
argues, there is a welfare function for government, entailed by the very
logic of industrial society. This prudential critique of the welfare
state is taken up by neoconservatives, who seek to limit, not to
eliminate, the welfare system. As Mahoney points out, "Aron's is the
rarest of liberalisms-a politic and political liberalism."

Aron is best known for his implacable opposition to totalitarianism.
In Defense of Political Reason features two essays on this
theme. The first (written in the fifties) is a detailed discussion of
Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism. Aron takes
Arendt's work seriously, but distances himself in several ways from
Arendt's phenomenological approach. It is necessary, he argues, to
analyze Soviet totalitarianism
sociologically and historically. Arendt's methodology exaggerates the
irrational dimensions of totalitarian rule and thereby misses the inner
contradictions that were weakening the "twin pillars" of the Soviet
system: ideology and terror. Not until the late 1980s did this erosion
become readily apparent. Aron's conception of human nature gave strength
to his conviction that Soviet tyranny, however brutal and ravaging,
would not last forever. The second piece is a withering polemic directed
at his long-time opponent and old friend Sartre. "Sartre and
Solzhenitsyn" makes clear Aron's repugnance at the literary politics of
Sartre and the other French gauchists. The cafe radicals failed to
understand the constraints and dangers of politics. They fantasized
their dreams as real, transforming evil into good and justifying the
unjustifiable. Against such ravings Aron poses the figure of
Solzhenitsyn, living witness to the consequences of successful literary
politics and ideology. Spiritually resolute, refusing to confuse the
realm of Caesar and the realm of God, Solzhenitsyn provides one of the
twentieth century's greatest defenses of liberty and one of the sharpest
denunciations of immoderate hopes for secular utopia.

Aron supports his prudential understanding of the political with an
anti-Hegelian philosophy of history. Mahoney has included one of Aron's
most fascinating essays, "The Dawn of Universal History." As Mahoney
argued in The Liberal Political Science of Raymond Aron, "The
Dawn of Universal History" contains the essence of Aron's thought, and
it has aged little since it was written in 1961. Central to the essay is
the distinction between history and the permanent constraints of human
nature. There is a "history as process"-the sweeping transformations
wrought by the democratic and industrial revolutions-and "history as
drama"-the permanence of tragedy, political conflict, and human nature
beneath all historical phenomena. For Aron history is partially
determined and partially free. Like Tocqueville, to whom he felt an
"elective affinity" (as is clear from the appendix "On Tocqueville"),
Aron believed that the realm of effective human action is sharply
circumscribed. This is why all politics is about the limitation of
options and why he so excoriated literary intellectuals for failing to
think politically. Within the circle of our freedom, we must choose
wisely to prevent the worst, to make life and politics more humane.

This modest belief in human decency and freedom explains why Aron did
not share the pessimistic notions of decline advanced by France's "New
Philosophers," the post-Marxist intellectuals who rose to prominence in
the 1970s. Thinkers like Andre Glucksmann and Bernard Henri-Levy, with
their "discovery" of the Gulag and their overheated rhetoric, clearly
taxed Aron's patience. When the naive dreams of utopia collapsed,
France's new philosophers employed their rhetorical skills like spoiled
children of the failed revolution. Rather than ideologies of decline,
what is needed is prudential wisdom: history contains good and evil,
progress and decline. In "For Progress-After the Fall of the Idols," the
latest essay included in this collection, Aron exhibits just such
wisdom, and it has been more and more evident in French intellectual
life since.

Liberal society is imperfect, as every human society must be. That it is
indefensible is something Aron would never admit. Although there is no
Aronian "school," a number of thinkers have sprung up around the
Centre de recherches politique Raymond Aron and the important
journals Commentaire, Le Debat, and, most recently, La
Pensee Politique-Pierre Manent (whose homage to Aron is included as
an introduction here), Francois Furet, Luc Ferry, Marcel Gauchet, and
many others. These thinkers have begun to explore the paradoxes,
imperfections, and possibilities of liberal society in a way that is in
keeping with the influence and example of Aron. This can only be
heartening to those who have looked on in horror as one wave after
another of French ideology crashed against our shores, transforming the
teaching of the humanities in American universities into something
inhumane. Mahoney's patient efforts to return Aron to his proper stature
in America as one of the foremost philosophers and political thinkers of
the twentieth century will perhaps be assisted by the exhaustion of the
storm that sent those waves, an exhaustion that is in no small part due
to the steadfast resistance of Aron himself. In Defense of Political
Reason should be read by anyone interested in politics, anyone who
seriously wants to understand the complexities, possibilities, and
threats of our time.

Brian C. Anderson is Research Associate in Social and Political Studies
at the American Enterprise Institute.